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What Publishing Leaders Need to Ask About Metadata

Old publishing problems often reappear in new forms, as any senior publishing executive will tell you. One obvious example is the basic book title information we now call “metadata.”

Metadata runs like digital lifeblood from publisher to retailer, and is critical to making books pop on the retailer’s homepage and in personalized marketing emails to readers. Over the past decade, publishers have developed new workflows for managing their metadata, and some have even migrated their data to ONIX, the highly efficient XML format for sharing metadata throughout the industry. However, it remains critically important for publishers to continue to upgrade their metadata reviews and workflows, as retailer websites and the industry pipeline continue to evolve.

To that end, here are five questions publishing executives need to ask their teams right now about their metadata:

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About Daniel Berkowitz

Daniel Berkowitz is senior editor of Digital Book World, where he oversees DBW's content and programming. Before joining DBW in July 2015, Daniel held several positions, including as a part of the editorial team at Grand Central Publishing. Daniel is a graduate of Vassar College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. His writing has been featured in Salon, AV Club and Time Out New York. He lives and works in New York City. You can follow him on Twitter at @DanJBerkowitz.

One thought on “What Publishing Leaders Need to Ask About Metadata”

Book publishers _do_ want to be able to do a better job of identifying the subjects of books, chapters, and components. They already have a lot of vocabularies designed to do just that. Plus many folks express the need for simple keywords: that is, NOT a controlled vocabulary, just let the publisher or the editor or the marketer or the author put in the damn file whatever words they think will make the right people find them and buy them. One contrasting example: Kevin Hawkins pointed out that for the University of Michigan, they are actually spending LESS effort on cataloguing [from the library perspective] because for content that _is_ online, people use search engines to find things, not library catalogs.

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